671–680 of 825 posts
This is very good news. Sadly, there is already quite some backlash, mostly coming from Apple aficionados. And I say "sadly" because it is always sad to see how people would try to defend companies and brands, against their own interests.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/698866.The_Myth_of_the_R...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently had a change of heart on this issue when the prevalence of fraudulent apps on the App Store was documented[1]. It's hard to argue that Apple is providing significant benefit to either consumers or developers for their 30% cut when they seem incapable of reigning in obvious fraud. In addition, I think Apple pushing subscriptions as a solution for long term app funding (instead of upgrade pricing or other op…
> Overall, Apple has not been a good steward of the App Store. But the question on my mind is: what precedent are we setting by legally mandating what a corporation can do on a platform they solely built? And are we pulling up the ladder after the incumbents have climbed it? It's one thing to mandate how much pollution a factory may leak into a shared water supply. But the Apple app store is not a utility or natural…
This does not concern setting precedents. The antitrust laws are already there, this is just a case of them being applied.
More broadly speaking, I'm not really sensitive to the argument "they built the platform, so they should get to choose to do with it whatever they want". Network effects are so large that there is effectively zero competition. What little competition there is can be easily squashed by Apple throwing a minuscule portion of its capital at it.
We need strong regulation to counter this, and to give small businesses a chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You‘re not forced to use them? So you have to pay your Spotify subscription by cash or checks. How many people will still subscribe to Spotify? I haven‘t ever seen a check in my live besides in TV. In some sense you are „forced“ to use them. And in some sense it is ok, as long as one party does not has to much power.
FYI: Apple disallow you to redirect your users to subscribe outside of their app without their fee. You cannot tell your users "go to our website to subscribe by check for 30% less", that gets you banned. So yes, you are forced to use them. > 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium con…
It's true that you're not allowed to advertise that you can do this inside the app itself, but that's not the same as saying you're not allowed to do it at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason a flat fee hadn't even crossed my mind, but that makes a lot of sense. The cost of an application doesn't change the distribution costs at all.
There’s fixed components to the cost as well as variable ones. Storage/CDN distribution is relatively fixed. I would say so is access to developer tools and APIs. What’s variable are services that an app may take advantage of, such as push notifications, geolocation queries, iCloud access, and App Store approvals. More established companies tend to release new versions on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
Cool, so let competition roll out implementations of these services, and developers can decide on their own if its worth using Apple's services or their competitors.
Consumers will be able to reap the benefits of increased competition, as the free market delivers to them better, cheaper and more efficient solutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (or would massively hike the fees for cheap sales) I've come to the viewpoint that this would be a good thing. I think we've moved too far in the direction of never paying for anything with cash.
And why would that be?
This is very good news. Sadly, there is already quite some backlash, mostly coming from Apple aficionados. And I say "sadly" because it is always sad to see how people would try to defend companies and brands, against their own interests.
You don't get to dictate to people what their own interests are, not matter how smug you feel about it.
Then you may argue if it is in the public interest to let companies compete at all or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You really need to cool it with the condescension > But I doubt you even know the costs to run the service so my opinion is that you are speaking from a place of ignorance. > You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing. That's some impressive cognitive dissonance ya got there, you might want…
>> I doubt you even know the costs > You have no idea how much involvement I had You're absolutely right. I said "I doubt you even know," not "I know for a fact you do not know," and am willing to be proven wrong. I made an assumption that I'm confident would apply to most people commenting on this story. I don't think I misrepresented it as anything other than an assumption. Until you show me some receipts I'm going…
Great, well, I'm not most people commenting on this story. If you've ever jailbroken an iOS device, there is a very high probability your device subsequently ran code that I wrote. I have distributed apps and tweaks to literally hundreds of thousands of users through the repos I've run. Don't make assumptions when you don't need to.
> You've misunderstood.
No, I think you've misunderstood. I did not say building hardware, an operating system, and an app store is easy. I said building an app store is easy. Let me quote myself:
> People keep saying "but you wouldn't have devices to distribute your app to without Apple" and while that is true, Apple is already capturing the value for that part of the deal – they're selling the devices to customers.
Look, I get it – you're holding on to the idea that Apple built the ecosystem, so they're allowed to do with it as they please. And in general I'm sympathetic to the idea that if you build something, you get to control it. The only problem is that it is not only Apple's ecosystem... the devices themselves belong to the people they sold them to, and Apple should not be able to unilaterally prevent those participants from using the devices they purchased as they wish in an anti-competitive way. This is precisely why we have anti-trust laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 percent fee is not a 30 percent margin. You are factoring in any costs of running and developing the service.
That argument leads to the logical conclusion that Apple needs to be broken up so their music subsidiary have to pay their app store subsidiary the same 30% as Spotify do. Still not a logical defense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m paying for those costs with my £1300 iPhone. Now I want to set whatever app as default that I like. Also it isn’t like apple aren’t offering those features - I can play music on Spotify with Siri already. They are just putting deliberate annoying barriers in the way to make their own product appear better.
There’s no way you are paying for 5 years of software development and your hardware for $1300. Suppose half the cost of iPhone was to build the physical object (likely low, given Apple’s 35% overall gross margins), you’re effectively saying that iOS is worth $10/mo, which is a gross underestimate. It is at least as complex a piece of software as Creative Cloud which costs $30/mo. As another benchmark, premium Android…
Windows costs me way less than that, why should iOS cost 500$?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is making anyone use apple platforms. They are free to choose from others.
Sure . the free market with only 2 players that were caught in the past colluding to do illegal shit https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo... , they would never collude to non compete on the Store tax or offering "transfer" services .